“Voice Buddy instantly puts you in the middle of the action and every command conveniently under your voice control.” – Fabrice Cambounet, Pacific Fighters Producer

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Flight simulation is one of the oldest video game genres that still continues to survive today. Many of us remember how incredible those first flight simulators seemed way back then a couple of decades ago. It’s even more amazing to look at flight simulators that are available today. They are ages beyond what we could ever imagine in our wildest dreams just a few years ago. Computing power of today’s home machines is finally approaching the levels that allow developers to create almost life-like 3d graphics and underlying physics modeling that make up a modern flight simulation.

For most of the history of flight sims the genre was dominated by products from large American publishers, focusing mostly on American and other Western aircraft. Thus when in late 1998 an unknown to the sim community Russian developer Oleg Maddox began promoting his new project focusing on the Russian Front of World War II the news were largely met with skepticism. However as more information on the project was revealed, and first screenshots began to appear, the international flight sim community’s attitude changed to ever more increasing anticipation. The project promised so much in terms of graphics and aircraft performance that some skeptics even claimed such a flight sim simply couldn’t exist, and was nothing but an elaborate hoax to swindle publishers out of some cash.

The first flight sim in the series, IL-2 Sturmovik, was released in November of 2001 and single-handedly revolutionized the genre. Not only did it instantly make all previous flight sims obsolete, even many of the competing products developed and released at a later time seemed dated to the original IL-2. The graphic engine, immaculately accurate and detailed aircraft exteriors and interiors, as well as highly advanced flight, damage and weapon modeling create a total package still unmatched by any flight sim to this day – three years after the original release!

IL-2 was met with universally great reviews and quickly built a very dedicated and strong community. The developers have showed incredible dedication to the project, releasing multiple free add-ons for IL-2 that added new content such as new flyable and AI-controlled aircraft, vehicles, ships and many new features. In March of 2003 a sequel was released, titled IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles which expanded the series to even more European battlefields, this time including some of the important aircraft from Russia’s Western Allies. In total, the IL-2 line of sims have sold over 650,000 units in Russia, and over 600,000 additional units in the rest of the world.